Biography

Professional Bio

Professor Leonard’s newest book is a multisited ethnography, Locating Home: India’s Hyderabadis Abroad, published by Stanford University Press in 2007. This book focuses on the diaspora from Hyderabad, India, to Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the Gulf states of the Middle East. A forthcoming book (appearing March 2010) is Histories of Intimacy and Situated Ethnography (Karen Isaksen Leonard, Ann Gold, and Gayatri Reddy, co-editors; Delhi: Manohar Books, 2010).

In 2003, Professor Leonard published Muslims in the United States: the State of Research (Russell Sage Foundation), a book that has brought her many speaking engagements and consultations. She has been involved with the Social Science Research Council, participating in workshops and planning sessions on research on Muslims and Islam in the United States and Europe. She spoke in the fall of 2003 on American Muslim politics in Hyderabad, India, several times, and she was the keynote speaker (on the same topic) in the spring of 2004 at Harvard University’s annual Young Muslims conference. She spoke in the fall of 2004 at the Religious Newswriters Association in Washington, DC, and at a Stanford conference on Understandings of Islam in France and the United States.

In the summer of 2005, Leonard gave three major conference papers abroad. In Paris, France, she spoke on migration and secularism, in Bellagio, Italy as a participant in a five day workshop on expatriates in the Gulf she spoke about political and cultural differences between Kuwait and the UAE, and in Ifrane, Morocco, at the World History Association, she spoke about the place of Africa in African American Islam. Leonards conference talks in the fall of 2005 included “Hyderabadis Abroad: Locating Home,” South Asia Conference, University of Wisconsin; “South Asian Muslims in the US: New Contributions to the Mix,” for SSRC/Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism workshop at the University of Southern California, “Religion and Society in Comparative Perspective: Punjabis and Hyderabadis “Translated” in the US,” for the Cultural Translations: Punjabi Culture conference, UCB; “Indians and Pakistanis in Uneasy Contact in the Gulf: the Power of States,” American Anthropological Association, Wash. DC.

Leonard reviews work on the history and culture of India, especially the former Hyderabad State, and on Asian American and Muslim American history and culture. She is Co-Director of the Center for Asian Studies at UCI for 2004-2007.

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Karen Leonard

Department of Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
University of California, Irvine